UPDATED BLOG: SA gets partial grant for bike share program

***IMPORTANT NOTE*** This is a blog updating a post (included below) that I wrote earlier today, regarding the city’s receipt of a federal grant for its bike share program, B-Cycle.

I just spoke to Laurence Doxsey, director of the city’s Office of Environmental Policy. He told me that yes, the city did receive a $324,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration to help pay for expanding the city’s bike share program to the four Spanish colonial missions south of downtown.

However, Doxsey informed me, that this amount is significantly less than what the city and the National Parks Service — which runs the mission grounds — had applied for. The city asked the feds for $458,000.

Besides the fact that the city didn’t get the full amount it wanted, there’s another problem: According to Doxsey, the grant stipulates that the money cannot go toward the purchase of bicycles, which means the city would have to scrounge up even more dollars.

Those two factors now mean the city has to decide whether to accept the grant at all and, if so, how to go about paying for the proposed bike share stations on a more limited budget.

“We ‘ll have to look at our ability to come up with any additional resouces that can make this happen,” Doxsey said Tuesday night when we spoke. “We’re excited always to be selected for things, but we want to make sure we can actually carry through on what we intended so that we don’t have mispalced expectations. We want to make sure we can do this project now that the award is actually different from what we applied for.”

San Antonio is the only Texas city which received money from this grant.

The city applied for the grant in conjunction with the National Parks Service, which oversees the four mission grounds. City Bike Coordinator Julia Diana said the city and the park service still have to determine the exact locations of the stations, like will they be at the missions or along the Mission Trail.

I reached Diana about this just as she got the email telling her the city had won the grant.

“It will be a wonderful way to see the missions and the trail, while enjoying the weather and the scenery, just taking in the grand grand vista that only San Antonio provides,” Diana said, shortly after I heard one of her co-workers in the background whoop in excitement after learning the city got the money. “I think we have something we can just shout out to the world about.”